On Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:02:04 +0000 (GMT), Andrew C Aitchison via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote:
>That is a surprise to hear. Reading this list has given me the impression >that the spam volume is worse now than it was then. Spamming is a much bigger >business now and the internet is faster, so I would have thought spammers >would be sending more messages, even compared to the increase in legitimate >email. "Better" can be an elastic concept. On the one hand, from the script that ran this morning, I see that only 4.2% of the SMTP dialogs registered in the logs qualified as "not hostile". These were communications that were consensual -- multicast from lists like this one, broadcasts from sources that users had given permission to, and various unicast messages from sources known and unknown. The rest were relay attempts, false authorization attempts (often laughably inept), messages to "sudden death" spamtraps, messages to "Nadine" and all of the contact addresses that briefly appeared on http://www.honet.com/Nadine, and a vast array of spammed addresses both valid and never valid. A significant percentage of these offenders are immediately identified by the Spamhaus advisory lists, and other such public services. There were also the usual attempts to wake up resident malware. >If they are sending comparatively fewer messages I can only imagine >that is because their strike rate is better, which is *more* worrying. >What have I misunderstood ? Compared to what we were trying to deal with back in, say, 1997, the volume of unsolicited broadcast email has gone up by several orders of magnitude. Simply based on raw volume numbers, the spammers won the war over a decade ago. From the standpoint of my users, things are much as they were back around 2005 -- volumes up, detection and suppression also up commensurately. >> but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some sites still have a 90%+ >> spam burden. Much of the current evolution of intake evaluation strategies is governed by the numbers describing what percentage of a major provider's resources are consumed by messages that nobody will ever see, but which must be evaluated, tested, examined, classified, and eventually stored/delivered to an account that is never accessed. Expect upheavals for some cohorts of mail senders. mdr -- The hits just keep on coming for poor "Nadine". See the sad tale of email lists gone horribly wrong at <http://www.honet.com/Nadine/> F - IW AA #2157 GEVNP _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
